


The Ballad of Bucky Bear

by follow_the_sun



Series: Team Stegosaurus vs. the Universe [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Mid-CATFA, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 21:39:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4321734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They've made a teddy bear that looks like Bucky Barnes, and it's amazing how much grief the Howling Commandos can give a guy about a thing like that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ballad of Bucky Bear

When Barnes looks back on it later, he decides it all started with the newsreel. So the cameraman and the director are the first ones who need to die.

At first, they’re just filming yet another propaganda piece about war bonds, because apparently part of the deal Steve swung to get his own team involved his continuing to raise money for the war effort. Barnes is initially in favor of this for two reasons: first, he’d like it as much as anyone if the Army could arrange to get his guys some better gear, preferably starting with his own desperate need for new boots; and second, watching Steve attempt to do manly posturing with the shield while tripping over his lines and looking helplessly at the camera is hilarious. This is why he’s hanging around on the outskirts of the shoot, pretending this is the only place he can possibly find to clean his rifle, the day the old Steve makes a sudden resurgence.

“No, you know what?” he says, after blowing the line “bullets, bombs, and bandages” for the sixth time, and Barnes looks up, suddenly alert. He knows this tone. “You know why I can’t get the stupid line right? Because this isn’t what I want to say to the folks on the homefront anymore. People know in their heads what the money’s for, but you gotta give them something for their hearts.”

Which is such a classically sappy-ass Steve thing to say, Barnes can’t believe anyone pays any attention to it. But the newsreel guys seem intrigued. “What did you have in mind?” says the director.

“Something more like this.” Steve walks off the little platform stage, strides over to Barnes, and grabs him by the shoulder. The cameraman swings his whole rig around to follow, and Barnes is in frame before he can extract himself. “Hi. I’m Captain America, and I’d like to introduce you to one of the bravest men I have the honor to know,” he says. “This is my personal friend, James Buchanan Barnes of the 107th Infantry. Back home in Brooklyn, we just called him Bucky.”

“Steve,” Barnes says warily, hoping for a reprieve, but Steve throws an arm around him and grabs the hand holding the rifle, pulling it into the shot.

“And this is the weapon Sergeant Barnes uses every day to protect the lives of my team, the Howling Commandos,” Steve says. “What kind of gun are you carrying, soldier?”

Once Steve drags you into something, there’s never any way out of it but through. “Well, Steve, this is an M1928A1 Thompson submachine gun.”

“What’s that?” Steve mugs looking at the gun in surprise, even though he’s seen it every single day since he pulled Barnes’s ass out of the HYDRA prison a month ago. “Did you say 1928? Bucky, are you telling me you’re carrying a weapon that was designed _fifteen years ago?”_

Steve knows absolutely nothing about guns. This is a perfectly good weapon and Barnes is lucky to have it. But he sees where Steve is going with it, and to be fair, other guys haven’t been as lucky with theirs as he has. “Actually, Steve,” he says, deciding that as long as he’s in this, he might as well commit to the part, “this particular design has been around since 1921. It adds eleven pounds to the weight I carry, and I can take fifty shots at the enemy before I need to change the magazine, assuming it doesn’t jam.”

“It can jam up in the field, you say? Putting our fighting men at risk? And this is the only weapon you can rely on to defend your team?”

“That’s correct, Captain,” Barnes lies. He’ll fight Nazis with a pocket knife if he has to, and one time he did, but he prefers not to tell Steve about that one.

Steve turns to face the camera. “You heard it here, America. Men like my friend Bucky rely on their weapons to keep on fighting for freedom, but the Army can only do so much. Your war bonds help keep your best guy equipped for battle. Buy a war bond today and help us bring him home.”

Everybody in earshot has stopped to watch in amazement, and the camera continues to roll for another ten seconds before somebody says “Cut” and Barnes turns to Steve to say, “Rogers, you’re a real trip, you know that? Here I am, minding my own business—”

“Wars might be won by men, but they’re still fought with weapons, Buck.”

“What does that even mean?” Barnes moans.

Steve claps him on the shoulder hard enough to make him wince and turns to the director. “So, do you want me to go back to the script, or are we done here?”

A week later, Colonel Phillips walks up to Barnes, takes the old gun out of his hand, replaces it with a gorgeous M1941 Johnson with a custom scope designed by Howard Stark himself, says, “Sergeant Barnes, _do_ not engage in wartime propaganda in the future,” and walks away before Barnes can reply.

After that they make him stand silently next to Steve during all the shoots, holding his new rifle and trying to imitate Steve’s earnest expression for the camera.

Well, shit.

 

It’s bad enough that the newsreel plays constantly, until all of the Howling Commandos start putting on their own little performances when he and Steve walk by (“Say, Bucky, is that a hole you’re digging?” “That’s right, Steve! Let’s tell the folks back home about how much the boys need a new latrine!”) But he doesn’t catch wind of the other thing until the first week of January when he finally gets a delayed Christmas package from his sister Rebecca, who’s currently working through her nursing training at Lenox Hill. Inside the package is a photo: two kids standing in front of the window of a toy shop, pointing eagerly at a pair of teddy bears propped up on a box. One of the bears is dressed up in a Captain America costume; the big tin shield makes it unmistakable, even in black and white. The other wears a coat with big brass buttons and, inexplicably, a little black mask like something out of a comic book. “Bucky Bear,” Rebecca has written on the back of the photo in her large looping script, “the toy all the little boys and girls want for Christmas!”

Torn between pride and embarrassment, he starts to stash the photo in his trunk, but right then Steve has to come in and say, “Hey, is that from Becca?” and grab it out of his hands so he can also get all the gossip from home. He laughs for at the photo for three solid minutes before he smacks Barnes on the back again with one of his dinner-plate-sized hands and walks off to show it to Dugan and Morita.

By nightfall, everybody in the unit is calling him Sergeant Buckybear, and somebody whose name is almost certainly Peggy Carter has cut eyeholes out of a long strip of black silk and left it on his pillow.

But it can always get worse.

 

There’s exactly one thing about an Army infirmary that isn’t terrible, and that’s the fact that there are nurses in it. When Steve force-marched him in here thirty-six hours ago—still protesting that he wasn’t sick despite being doubled over his aching gut, with chills racking his whole body, because this is the kind of thing you do when you have Captain Denial for a role model—he wasn’t in any shape to appreciate his surroundings. But now that he’s sitting up under his own power again, he’s discovered a wonderful fact: nurses also watch newsreels. The ward nurse is having a fit over how many excuses they’re finding to stop by his cot, and if he plays it up—a slight cough here, a groan there—to get the pretty blue-eyed one to come over and put her hand on his forehead, well, he’s been following Steve into every cockamamie plan he’s come up with for four months, and he figures he’s earned a little extra sympathy.

The pretty nurse is perched on the edge of his cot in direct violation of a lot of rules, and he’s telling her why she should visit New York after the war, when Dugan and Morita and Jones all troop in, smirking. Not only does the nurse jump up, disentangling his arm from around her waist, but he can tell from their gleeful expressions that something unpleasant is about to happen to him.

Dugan starts it off gently enough with, “So, Sarge, you tossed all the cookies you’re gonna toss this week?”, followed by some unsettlingly realistic retching. Barnes returns fire with, “I’d rather puke than have the Clap, Dugan,” and they all generally give each other shit for a while until Jones finally gets down to business: “Hey, Barnes, since you missed mail call, we brought some mail to you. Think it’ll help your little tummyache to get a package from home?”

“What’d I get?” Barnes says, making no effort to disguise his eagerness. He’s really hoping his mother sent him some new socks, and he’s willing to roll the dice on being able to keep down a candy bar.

Morita produces a cardboard box, and they’re suddenly all wearing very straight faces, but Barnes doesn’t see the danger coming. “You couldn’t wait for me to open it myself, huh?” he says, undoing the clumsily retied string. He sets the lid aside, and the smile fades from his face.

Becca has mailed him a Bucky Bear.

Rebecca Barnes is the sweetest girl on the planet, and her brother will fight anyone who says otherwise. She never does anything without the best intentions, and in particular, she’s kind to Steve, although her steady parade of boyfriends has made it clear there’s no interest there. She’s a genuine saint and will never in a thousand years understand the horror of what she’s just done to him.

“Aw, jeez, guys,” he says, and the Commandos lose their shit. They’re living up to the squad name by howling with laughter when the ward nurse comes over to eject them, and it’s only when she threatens to kick Barnes out, too, “seeing as he feels up to having such raucous visitors,” that they actually leave, although Morita gets one more shot over his shoulder—“Be sure to tuck that bear in with him tonight! He can’t get to sleep without it!”—that’s sure to become legendary throughout the 107th.

The spike of pain that goes through his head has nothing to do with any medical condition.

A couple of the nurses do actually drop by on their way off shift to coo over the Bucky Bear on the table by his cot, and because he never learns his lesson, Barnes briefly dares to hope that the joke will be on the other Commandos, but then he hears the ward nurse reprimanding the blue-eyed nurse for smooching Falsworth behind the barracks. Some days, a guy just can’t win for losing.

 

Bucky Bear becomes the Commandos’ unofficial mascot. Dernier suggests, via translation, that they should get their own special plane so they can paint the bear on the fuselage. It’s creepy how fast Steve responds with a drawing of a Bucky Bear wearing a wig and a short skirt, pinup style. Barnes is just starting to believe he’s lived that down when the guys start sneaking the bear into their backpacks whenever they go out in the field, so that they can hide it in his tent at night. He tries to send an unequivocal message by finding some string and symbolically hanging it by the neck from a tent pole, but the next night it shows up _inside his bedroll_ somehow, with a note pinned to its jacket that says, “If you cut off one head, two more shall take its place!”, which would be pretty funny except that, you know, it isn’t.

“Aw, cheer up, buddy,” says Steve, “you know they wouldn’t bother if they didn’t love you, and it’s so good for their morale.”

Barnes is just generally having a run of bad luck. After the food poisoning there’s the excursion where they get pinned down without air support and have to implement another Cockamamie Steve Plan (which he’s just shorthanding to CSP now, because they happen so often) in order to escape with their lives. Then there’s one where they chase a HYDRA squad halfway across Poland, getting shot at the whole way, and still lose the target, because even Captain America can’t win them all. Then it rains for two weeks straight, and then, on the first sunny day when it’s worth going outside again, Barnes is just walking through camp minding his own business when he trips over an ammo box and sprains his ankle. Barnes isn’t usually superstitious, but it feels like the damn Bucky Bear is ruining his life.

He almost comes around when Carter performs an unexpected act of kindness. They’ve bonded a little over stories of Steve’s stupidity, but it seems like he puts his foot in his mouth every time he talks to her; and for his part, he can’t quite forget that she’s with the people who brought Steve into this crazy war in the first place. But when he limps into the barracks and finds the bear on his pillow, with a white ribbon bound around one rear paw like a bandage and two precious Heath bars tucked into its jacket, he knows it has to've been her, and he decides that maybe the bear thing really is all in good fun and he should try not to be so touchy about it.

Then he wakes up with a Bucky Bear mask drawn on his face in shoe polish.

It’s everybody’s bad luck that the next day is when the reporter shows up. Barnes, who finally sucked up his pride and appealed to Carter for makeup remover, is sitting there rubbing his eyes, hoping he got all the gunk out of his eyebrows, when Steve suddenly gets called to Phillips’ office. “Hey, Bucky,” he says, “can you show Frank around until I get back?”

Frank, who’s been knocking around Europe for a while as a war correspondent, turns out to be an okay guy, not a soldier, but sympathetic to a soldier’s problems. Barnes gives him the tour—yes, the actual base where Captain America lives, works, and commits stuffed toy atrocities against his best pal who only ever tried to look after him—and it’s only when they’re heading back toward Command so Frank can finish up with Rogers that he says, “Bucky! I finally realized where I know that name from.”

“They put me in the newsreels with Steve a lot,” he says. “It’s not my idea.”

“No, that’s not it. It’s because my daughter back home has one of those Bucky Bears. That’s you, isn’t it? You’re Bucky like the Bucky Bear!”

It just so happens that four other Howling Commandos—Morita, Dernier, Falsworth, and Jones—are standing within earshot of this revelation. Later, they will all swear to Steve on a stack of Bibles that although it’s a perfectly pleasant warm spring day, the entire area falls silent and a cold wind whips through the base.

Barnes takes a very deep breath. Then he takes another. Then he says, “You know, it’s funny. At first, I didn’t like the Bucky Bears. But then I realized, if it makes the little kids at home feel better about the war, if they feel like they’ve got one of Captain America’s buddies looking out for them, then I’m honored to be a part of that.”

Dernier nudges Jones for a translation. Jones shushes him.

“The only thing that bothers me now,” Barnes says, “is that the Howling Commandos are the only soldiers people seem to hear about. I heard somebody say a while back that there are more than seven million men in the U.S. Army right now. _Seven million._ And every one of them is somebody’s brother, or dad, or sweetheart. What we’re doing over here, with Captain America, it’s a great story. But it’s no more important than what every other guy is doing, being ready to lay down his life for freedom. I hope the folks back home understand that.”

It’s exactly the kind of speech Rogers gives on a daily basis, but Bucky has never said anything like it before. They all look at each other—well, Dernier does after Jones translates it—and are mystified. “He’s turning into Rogers,” Morita finally says. “He’s spent too much time with the guy and he is actually becoming a second Steve Rogers. Now we’re going to have two of them to deal with.”

“No, Barnes has simply gone mad,” says Falsworth. “Mark my words: soon we’ll see him running nude through the base, convinced that he's a banana.”

“Nous sommes en difficulté,” says Dernier.

None of them is ready for what actually happens.

 

Everything seems to be fine until, at 1853 hours, an explosion occurs at the north end of the Army base.

At 1854 hours, the entire 107th is running around like chickens with their heads cut off, assuming the base is under attack.

At 1858 hours, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes presents himself to Colonel Phillips for disciplinary action.

At 1900 hours, an announcement goes out over the loudspeaker that there has been no attack—just an accident with some exploded ordnance, no one’s been hurt—and all personnel should resume their regular duties.

At 1902 hours, disciplinary action of Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes begins.

At 1908 hours, Captain Steven Grant Rogers runs up to the command center and finds Agent Peggy Carter with her ear to the door, listening. “Shhh,” she says, and waves him over.

At 1911 hours, Steve says, “How long can Phillips keep coming up with new words for stupid without repeating any?”

“Impressively long, I should say,” says Carter.

At 1923 hours, Colonel Phillips runs out of new words for stupid.

At 1925 hours, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes is informed that he’d better not count on his friendship with Rogers to save him if he pulls a stunt like this again and that he will surrender one half of his base pay for the next two months as a result of his catastrophic foolhardiness.

“Well,” says Carter, “Phillips had one more word in him after all.”

At 1926 hours, Bucky Barnes walks out of the commander’s office wearing a smile as bright as the sun.

 

“So you wanna tell me what that little stunt was all about?” Steve asks. The two of them have climbed up and are sitting on the sloped roof of the mess hall, which nobody else could probably get away with, but Steve is Steve and every so often he climbs something and nobody yells at him because he’s Captain America. And then he jumps off it, because the only thing Steve likes more than climbing up tall things is jumping off them.

“Nothing,” Barnes says. “It just kind of happened, that’s all.”

“You just kind of _happened_ to _fire a mortar?_   What, you accidentally fell on it with a lit match in your hand?”

“Yup.”

“You know the only thing that saved your bacon is the fact that nobody got hurt. Phillips would’ve court martialed you on the spot, so it’s a damn good thing there weren’t any casualties.”

“Well,” Barnes says, unable to control his grin any longer, “technically, there was only one.”

**Author's Note:**

> There's a not-really-but-sort-of sequel to this at [To Save The American Way](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5525318).
> 
> [The Tumblr post for this fic is [here](http://follow-the-sun-fanfic.tumblr.com/post/146675385235/the-ballad-of-bucky-bear-followthesun).]

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [(Podfic) The Ballad Of Bucky Bear](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8200810) by [follow_the_sun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun), [x_Nichtz_x](https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_Nichtz_x/pseuds/x_Nichtz_x)




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